Keke Palmer can still recall every word to a pivotal scene in Akeelah and the Bee, the 2006 film that put her on the map. Lip-synching the dialogue two decades later, Palmer tells Vanity Fair, “I love that little girl, you know? She was fighting for her life, okay?” Luckily, a young Palmer had costars Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne as mentors: “In so many ways, they were my first teachers in the industry.”

While walking down memory lane for Vanity Fair’s Scene Selection, Palmer reflected on her three seasons as star of the Nickelodeon series True Jackson, VP, from 2008 to 2011. “I grew up watching Disney, Nickelodeon, always being like, Wow, it would be so cool to do something like that. We all did. And it actually happened,” says Palmer. “Like, I was just gagged beyond belief.”

But headlining a TV show as a 15-year-old meant sacrificing parts of her childhood. “I had to grow up really fast,” says Palmer, “I had to not worry about having kid feelings because I was in a workplace doing a job. As a kid, you’re supposed to be able to be unreasonably angry, unreasonably sad, unreasonably whatever—because you’re a kid. But because there was so much at stake, I just couldn’t do it.”

When Palmer began to age out of adolescent roles, some opportunities dried up. “This is when people weren’t really referencing Akeelah and the Bee or True Jackson, VP, as much anymore,” Palmer recalls. “It was just a whole new world when I was an adult. Like everything I did as a kid kind of disappeared in a lot of ways.”